Larry Wall: Manipulexity and
Whipuptitude - Fortune

Larry Wall: Manipulexity and
Whipuptitude

If you were a Unix programmer you either programmed in C or
shell. And there really wasn't much in between. There were these
little languages that we used on top of shell, but that was the big
divide. The big revelation that hatched Perl, as it were, was that
this opened up into a two-dimensional space. And C was good at
something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of
complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call
whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.

So Perl was hatched. As a small egg. That was Perl 1. And it was
designed from the very beginning to evolve. The fact that we put
sigils in front of the variables meant that the namespaces were
protected from new keywords. And that was intentional, so we could
evolve the language fairly rapidly without impacting.

And it evolved… And it evolved… And finally we got to Perl 5.
And… So… Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms
Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that.